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Recently I have entered a contest to lose the most weight at my work.  Being the geek that I am, I created an online spreadsheet using Google Documents. Unbelievably, I found a very basic error in Google Documents.  You can see from the image below (click for larger) that I have two columns that are generated from a very simple formula: B2-B3, basically 263.4 – 254.9 and the answer is 8.5.  But Google Documents says its 8.49999999999997.  A very odd error to see.

OK, this isn’t political. A few years back a lot of folks implemented a ‘google bomb’ to tie George Bush’s White House profile with the term ‘miserable failure’.  Turns out with the change of a website, this bomb now ties to Barack Obama.

The old saying to treat others as you want to be treated comes to mind.

However Obama has something that Bush doesn’t.  Friends in Google.  Took them 4 years to fix it for Bush.  Took them DAYS! to fix it for Obama.

My friend Microsoft gets a lot of flack for being ‘evil’, yet Google has gotten a pass for far to long. 

Hat tip to Chris Blankenship for this one.

As a developer you get dumb questions from newbies (and experienced people as well) all the time.  Things that you know with about 60 seconds of effort could have been answered without bothering you.

In comes the best way ‘teach a person to fish’ rather than give them a fish.

Instead of giving the person the answer, you send them a link that shows them how to use Google!

One thing I've hated about gMail is its inability to white list my address book, or certain emails.

Well finally they are getting close.  They now allow us to save certain emails.

I used to get an email from WebProNews, some junk but occasionally some good SEO in it.  But it ends up in my spam bucket:

Now I can go to Settings -> Filters and create a new filter that matches this email address and then on the next page I am given this option:

And now I will get that email.  Now I just need the option to white list my address book.

If you are a .NET developer you've faced the issues I've faced when using a major search engine... results that don't really fit your problem.

But Google has an interesting feature that allows you to create a custom search engine.  You define the sites it searches. 

Dan Appleman has put together a site www.searchdotnet.com that searches his list of .NET sites and overall the results I get from this site are pretty good.

So I am in the process of transferring my church 's website from www.bataviachurch.org to www.lifestreamcc.org since we changed our name on June 1st.

Along with this change it was required of me to get a new FeedBurner link for our sermons since I had 'BataviaChurchOfChristSermons' originally.

I figured I'd give a few simple names a try first.... and you won't believe what worked.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/streamingsermons

Thats it!  I was stunned that out of 1.7 million feeds that this wasn't already taken.  But it wasn't!

Very cool.

Well I think I am finally dropping FoxMarks.

FoxMarks is a Firefox Extension that synchronizes your bookmarks between machines.  It was a beautiful extension until version 2 was released.  Version two has been a train wreck, and for the longest time I just kept running version 1.  However I quickly grew tired of the notification that my FoxMarks extension was out of date, so I finally decided to give version 2 one last try.

Needless to say it failed bad.  Its a shame to see such a good product become such a bad product.

So I did a search for a replacement option and find out about Google Browser Sync.  Syncs not only my bookmarks, but also my cookies, history, saved passwords, and open tabs and windows.  BEAUTIFUL!

Now when I switch from my work PC to my home PC I keep many of my settings.

The big news is that Microosft has offered to buy Yahoo!  But Google isn't happy.... says it would be unfair if they combined.  Here is the problem with this, in this arena Microsoft isn't the big bad bully... Google is.  Microsoft and Yahoo just don't compete with Google in search.

My personal take is that the merger is a big yawn.  I rarely use Yahoo.  I use Live search when I remember to, kind of a dog food thing... M$ has provided me a generous life style with their products, so hard to be against it.  But what makes Google hard to compete with is its integration... I keep waiting for a LiveSearch tool bar for my firefox browswer and I'd certainly install it over my Google toolbar, but its just a habit of mine to goto that area of my browser to make a search.

So yesterday I made a post saying that my Feedburner email was put in gMail's spam folder.

Was surprised to get an email in my inbox from a Google employee wanting me to send him the original email... had a thought later in the day to Google his name... Matt Shobe.  That's right, co-founder of Feedburner. 

Two thoughts came to mind:

1. Whoa... what in the world is he doing emailing little ole me?  He was co founder of a company sold for $100,000,000!  I don't know about you, but if I sell an idea for that... I'm retiring!  Or if I am working I am certainly not emailing 'customers' about issues.

2. Whoa... how'd he get my post??? Two thoughts... one heck of a data mining program to find stuff like that... no way he's reading my blog is he? 

Turns out that there are employee's that keep an eye out on mentions of what people are saying about FeedBurner... and my post was brought to his attention.

So he forwarded my issue onto an internal Google employee to stop the emails from being marked as spam.

Took advantage of the time to bring up another issue to him... one I'd really love to see fixed.  Time will tell. 

So over to the left I allow you to subscribe to my blog via email.  I have my gmail account subscribed so I can see it come through. However today I didn't get it, and I find the email in the spam folder!

The great irony here... Feedburner is a Google owned company!  You'd think of all places they white list their own companies would be high on that list.

Click to see larger image.